Wednesday, 9 January 2013

A Culture of Violence

Let's
face it: are we really that surprised with the shameless
levels of misogyny on display on our TV screens, and on our Twitter and
Facebook feeds? I mean, we know it's that bad, and probably,
this just scratches the surface (a very large
surface, as this post by CNN-IBN illustrates). Of course, what's happening
is that the polemic against politicians and the political class in general is
strengthening, and so is the sense of repugnance against the same – which has
already quite mature in India in the course of the last few years.

In
my opinion, the RSS (and its lackeys, like the VHP) are among the most
regressive, violent, and at the same time, robustly organised ideological
instruments in the country today. And so are institutions like Jamaat-e Islami
Hind, or Asaram Bapu’s spiritual-commercial enterprise. While, on the one hand,
religion per se really has nothing to do with things, insofar
as we look at it in the realm of the secular, democratic nation-state; on the
other, it is difficult to overlook the fact that religion is among
the several governance mechanisms that form the ideological basis of the
patriarchal nation-state and moral-economy (I’ve
briefly elaborated what I mean by governance in an earlier post).

Women
in such conditions are organised in a descending order, based on their supposed
“virtues”. At one point, it seems inevitable that these patriarchal ideologues
would make such absurd, but politically virulent statements; because such
institutionalised and ideological misogyny are required to establish the domain
of control in the patriarchal moral-economy. This is not to suggest that men
and masculinities are not policed; of course they are. But the paradox is: the
misogynist then becomes the embodiment of the hegemon; the basis of defining
masculinities (or a masculinity, in particular) is hinged on,
and operationalized in, the acts of violence against women.

While
this polemic against the political class is a step in the right direction, and
is entirely justified, what it does, I believe, is limits our interrogation of
misogyny, patriarchy, sexism and violence – forms of oppression which happen to
be far more pervasive, virulent and often, invisible to the public discourse(s)
or anti-political polemics. This is the misogyny of the everyday life; a
culture of violence, real, symbolic and otherwise, which women from across
classes, castes, and spaces face. A kind of violence practically everyone engages
in, including, I suspect, some of the polemicists. Now, as tempting as it is, I
wouldn’t go as far as calling this hypocrisy. ‘Hypocrisy’ would mean double
standards, and at least an element of volition. Sure, a lot of
politicians are hypocrites (a professional requirement these days, in my
opinion), but the kind of double-sidedness I’m talking about is incredibly
nuanced, invisible and pathological (and, most importantly, not seen in
dichotomies); it is embedded in our language, it informs our responses, colours
our perspectives. Political misogyny is, to use a cliché, only the tip of the
iceberg.

Snehalata
Gupta, writing for Kafila, puts forth a pertinent and critical perspective in
her discussion on patriarchy in the classroom. Gupta, who is a teacher at a
co-ed in Delhi, recounts an incident when one of her 'difficult' male students,
all of 16 or 17 years, suggested that she wear a dupatta in class. Her not
doing so, explained the boy, “embarrassed” him and his male classmates –
something she termed a "blatant show of patriarchal arrogance". The
incident, in my opinion, is ubiquitous and far more common than just this
one post. There are certain elements that I'd like to borrow from Gupta's
reflexive post in an attempt to understand what I mean by the pervasiveness of
patriarchy: namely, the male gaze, peer group socialisation and the
operationalization of patriarchy.

The
‘male gaze’ is an overused term in sociological lexicon, but in popular
discourse, it is very rarely understood. Not only does the gaze have a policing
or a predatory function (the Foucauldian surveillance), it is also an
articulation of the misogyny I was harping on about. The term ‘objectifying
women’, as overused as it is in our references to Bollywood and “item numbers”,
is more than just reducing them to objects of sexualised desires (there is a
variety of literature, for instance, that argues for an agentic function in
such objectification; most of the discussions on The Dirty Picture,
for instance, encapsulate this). The gaze then is, as I mentioned before, an
operationalization of misogyny; a brutal way of policing: (a) sexualities, especially
of women (and men) exercising sexual freedom; (b) the process of socialization,
which essentially indoctrinates children into patriarchy, as Snehalata Gupta’s
post so clearly illustrates; and finally, (c) of ensuring that the patriarchal
moral-economy functions through such surveillance mechanisms: the gaze itself
being one, and
the more well-known examples are what Shuddhabrata Sengupta has called “eminent
Bharatiya moustachioed misogynists”.

I've seen
such misogyny being operational in the last few years of my schooling.
There wasn't, to the best of my knowledge, any serious or untoward
incident; but what many of us consider trivial, are actually very strong
symptoms of the kind of pervasiveness of misogyny that I am trying to explicate
in this essay. For instance, I recall vividly how the consumption of porn, and
what kind of porn, defined the sort of male you were; girls
were encoded on the basis on their bodies; the classes were segregated almost
with religious zeal (I was in a Catholic school, yes); any casual interaction
with the opposite sex, if not an opportunity to ‘score’ (I use the term despite
its value-laden nature) was, well, looked at as a wasted opportunity. Sure, a
lot of this can be called a part of growing up, or adolescent fantasies –
something many have indulged in, as well. But there is a problem in trivialising
misogyny or rape, especially under the adage of “boys will be boys” or such
codswallop. Michele
Weldon's article on al-Jazeera, for instance, discusses the way in which
community efforts, the family and cultural shifts can prevent sexual violence,
in the aftermath of the rape of a sixteen year-old girl in Ohio by two local
football stars. What was staggering, she writes, was the way the
perpetrators bragged on about them violently subjugating the girl. In her
analysis, Weldon writes that “no mother wants her son to grow up to be a
rapist, just as no mother wants her daughter to be raped”. However, she
concedes that her naive notion of the family being able to prevent sexual
violence is flawed; a scepticism I share as well, after having met many amiable
parents whose kids were, to put it politely, “difficult”. The production of
misogyny and violence, therefore, is not localized to one site; peer groups,
class stratification, the media, etc. form a network of the patriarchal
moral-economy. Any alternatives focusing on rectifying faults in family and/or
education are problematic because it assumes that there could be
alternative; an alternative that requires the destabilization of the
patriarchal moral-economy, of which socialization and education is but a
microcosm.

That
said, I also have a problem with our excessive emphasis on misogyny, which by
definition is a strong dislike for women. The female object, therefore, is the
central focus of misogynistic discourses, and of those trying to interrogate
it. However, the fact that many, including myself to an extent, have taken for
granted is the gender dichotomy implicit our critiques. Many have argued that
there is a continuum of gendered violence of which gays, lesbians, transgender
people are as much victims as are women (again, a fissured category). This is
something the polemicists have ignored completely; except perhaps, the token
Gay Pride marches. ‘Misogyny’, then, is a limiting term insofar as we assume
there is a stable category of a biological female. Violence against women is
very, very real; but so is the violence against people labelled as ‘sexual
minorities’. Following
Judith Butler’s highly influential idea of gender performativity, it is
possible to argue that violence is indeed located in a gendered continuum; a
network of power relations among social groups, relations of dominance and
subversion. But this happens to be a domain that is entirely absent in our
public discourses and polemics; sure, there has been a lot of discussion on homosexuality
after the decriminalization of Section 377 in 2009, or in the collective
efforts of many civil society organisations fighting for equal rights of gays,
lesbians and transgender people. But these discussions are seldom articulated in the space marked off as ‘violence against women’, or ‘justice for rape
victims’.

Women aren't the
only victims of patriarchal violence; the culture of violence is virulent, and
operates on many different terrains; victimizes many different people; and
thus, as a public, already galvanised, I feel it is imperative that we adopt a
stance that does not exclude other marginal voices. However, our failure and,
I’m afraid, our reluctance, to have done so reflects a deeper problem; a
problem of the culture of violence; a problem that we must identify and
address. Any interrogation of this culture of violence, of this
institutionalised misogyny, of the patriarchal moral-economy, requires a
sustained engagement with these problems, and our first step in this direction
is to acknowledge that the problem runs far, far deeper than just politicians,
and right-wing, fundamentalist outfits.

Acknowledgements: First
of all, to Natasha Patel, for patiently reading this, as well as many other
drafts in the past, for humouring me and never faltering on feedback; to
Tasneem Kakal, for her pertinent comments (some of them on my bad grammar); and
to Shubhra Rishi, who I cannot seem to thank enough.